CeMoRe Seminar with Pete Adey on Evacuation

Date: 22 January 2013 Time: 4.15pm to 6.00pm

Venue: Bowland North SR 15

Pete Adey, Royal Holloway University of London - Tuesday 22 January 2013 - 4.15pm to 6.00pm - Bowland North SR 15

EVACUATE: monitoring mobility in emergency In this paper I outline the start of a project that seeks to reconcile interdisciplinary and critical approaches to evacuation mobilities - from social science to engineering, to art and literature. The paper will indicate the blurred socio-material and legal status of the evacuee, a subject moving through multiple categorisations of identity, rights and needs, through multiple fields of concern, duty and obligation. More specifically the paper will explore the efforts to engineer techniques to monitor and keep track of the evacuated. Working across the interests of public health, transportation and highways, police and emergency services, security, intelligence and counter-terrorism within different scales of government, the chapter outlines what Mimi Sheller has called the 'mobility justice' for the evacuated. In other words, it asks just what is at stake in the surveillance, categorisation, mobilisation and treatment of the evacuated subject. It explores the imperfect systems that record and manage evacuated populations made socially, technically and legally indistinct. It questions the violence of one becoming-evacuee and the motion of returning. It unpicks the negotiation and ambiguity of identity as profiles and registration practices are continuously befuddled, escaped, and ultimately got wrong. And it follows the consequences of all this for our mobile lives made potentially more vulnerable by the very systems intended for our security.

Much of my research has contributed to the putative 'new mobilities paradigm', and I published my first book Mobility with Routledge in 2009, a further co-edited Handbook of Mobilities is forthcoming with Routledge, and with Monika Busher (Lancaster) I am co-editor of the new Changing Mobilities book series. My most direct research interests orbit around three main empirical and conceptual sites of enquiry: the airport/border; the vertical territorial and material spaces of air; and the political and technological spaces of emergency and evacuation. In 2011 I was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize which will enable me to consolidate and elaborate this last area of interest.